Work Text:
The party was the same as always. The people, the drinks, the clamor. A very handsome painter was talking loudly to a very interesting bassoonist from Romania whose hair was stuck to her lipstick; vivid, carmine, and smeared. The handsome painter kept speaking louder and louder, over the crashing crescendos of diatonic scales being played by the very exciting pianist behind him, but it didn’t matter; Otabek didn’t think the very interesting bassoonist was even listening.
Nobody was listening in the whole flat. People stared, listless, as the very expressive young dancer went through the new steps written for her by a very daring young choreographer, moving in the square foot of space allotted in a crush like the Lamberts’ parties always were. The music was loud and the room was hot, and everybody had come in search of a Good Time, or barring that, a Good Story. The Lamberts’ wasn’t the place to be in Paris, or even next door to it, but it was one of many possible steps on the way to the place, or so Otabek had been told.
He took another swallow of his drink. The tonic was warm and the gin was bad.
Nobody cared about photography here, especially not the sort he did. After the war, he’d stayed on in Paris, with nobody and nothing left in Almaty to make it home. The Russians had seen to that. His heart ached when he thought of Kazakhstan, the animals lying slaughtered in the fields and the booted feet in the city streets, but war had made him another person, living in another time. He’d seen things through his camera lens that were even worse than dead sheep or the casual cruelty of Bolshevik bureaucracy, and now every day he looked through it again, seeing the world as it was.
The people here saw the world they wished to see. Spilled champagne and bright paint on canvas, the endless tinny jazz of cranked gramophones, bare-kneed dancing women and men in soiled linen suits. Cheap living, late nights, laughter. A place to pass through, a place to be, until summer came and it was off to the seaside, or in winter to the Alps to ski. Never glancing at the city around them, never seeing the boy herding milk goats in the street or the men who fished for their living in the Seine, the women hanging wet laundry out to dry. Making art from their heads and their dreams, never from life.
Otabek took another swallow of his drink. It was even warmer now, and still bad.
He made his way across the flat, aiming for the little iron balcony, crowded but promising fresh air, or at least quieter air. As he reached the louvered door, the people outside turned as one, laughing, stepping over the threshold. He caught sight of black, sleek hair, a red cupid’s bow mouth, sparkling skirts and starched shirt fronts, high stepping shoes, as they brushed past him.
“Chiaroscuro,” the woman said, laughing again, her low voice dark and sharp as polished obsidian, and tossed her head.
Otabek stepped onto the rickety balcony, leaning on the rusted railing to look out over the dim and dirty alley below. He’d come to Paris for work and stayed for art, but there was very little of either here for him now. No assignments from the news bureau since he’d given his notice, and ten months later he was still on the fringes of the true artistic milieu, catching only hints and whispers of it. He rented a shabby room on the top floor of a cold-water building in Montparnasse, made almost unendurable by the landlady’s ceaseless quarrels and indifferent cooking, but he could push a rolled towel against the bottom of the door and develop his pictures there, and every so often he came out to parties like this one in search of kindred spirits, or at least a decent drink.
Slim chance of either tonight, Otabek thought, turning his back on the alley below and spreading his arms across the wrought-iron rail, blackened with the grime and ash of a dozen unwashed years. He leaned on his hands and looked to his left, and in the low yellow streetlight that illumined everything at night in Paris, he saw a furious angel.
The photographer in Otabek was moved first, seeing the lines of the profile, the pushed-back golden hair and the slender form, all cast against the dingy white stone of the buildings behind him. Then the expression — the watchful eyes, the downturned mouth that disdained its own hopes, the jut of the small chin. Part of the night scene, yet somehow cast in relief against it, like a figure stepping from a painting to address the viewer.
Appraising green eyes slid to the side, narrowing. “What do you want?” the young man growled, in heavily-accented French.
The man in Otabek bloomed to life, curling flames moving through his body at the familiar tones. He swallowed hard, setting his jaw and tightening his grip on the rail behind him. “You speak Russian?” he asked, the language a sweet ache on his tongue. Not the solid, earthy Kazakh of his childhood, but not French either, as effervescent and bad for the head as too much champagne.
The other man stared at him for a moment, slouched against the wall. Otabek noticed, for the first time, the reddish glint of a tiny, lit cigarette in his hand, before it flicked over the railing, down to the rubbish and rags of the alley below. “Да.”
“You don’t meet many, here,” Otabek said.
There was a still, tense pause, and then the young man shifted, pushing himself away from the wall with rolling, leonine grace and reaching into his pocket. “This party is shit. Cigarette?”
Otabek shook his head. “Thanks, no.”
“My friend brought me here, then fucked off with some girl,” the young man muttered around a fresh tiny cigarette between his lips, as he searched for matches in his trouser pocket. “Fucking painters.”
Otabek nodded. He'd yet to meet a painter in Paris who was half the artist he thought he was, or who painted half as much as he drank. “Work is work, though. Do you model for just him or others?”
Flame sparked in the other man’s cupped hands, a flint-scented curl of matchsmoke rising up to frame his frown of disgust. He dropped his hand, shaking out the match, and drew in a wet breath before exhaling a pointed plume of tobacco. “I'm not a fucking model. I’m a dancer.”
“Oh,” Otabek said, a remark of surprise as all his impressions shifted. The slight but sculpted form, muscles for strength as much as grace, shoulders broad beneath the rough linen of his open white shirt. The young man moved beautifully, even as a sneer twisted his fine features.
“What do you do? Or are you just one of those tourist hangers-on, here to gawk at the bohemian life? Your clothes look bourgeois enough.” He looked Otabek up and down.
“I'm a photographer,” Otabek said. “I stayed on after the war. Otabek Altin.”
The young man stared at his outstretched hand. “Yuri Ivanovich Plisetsky,” he said, and took it. “Where are you from, Altin?”
“Almaty.”
Yuri’s face shifted, thoughts sliding across. “I’m from Moscow.”
“I’ve known men from Moscow before,” Otabek said. He held Yuri’s eyes with his own. “In my country.”
But Yuri only shook his head before letting go, looking away. “I left Moscow long before I was a man. Ten years ago my grandfather saw which way the wind was blowing.”
“It blew you to Paris?”
“Eventually,” Yuri said. He gazed over the dingy alley, pushing a lock of yellow hair behind his ear. He wasn’t especially tall, but his carriage gave him presence. He held himself easy. “You photographed the war, Altin?”
“The things I saw, yes.”
“And now what do you photograph?”
“The things I see,” Otabek said.
Yuri looked back, and on his face was the smile of a very young, very earthly angel. “I’d like to see what you see, Altin.”
*****
It was sixty-seven stairs to the top of the building where Otabek lived, and every one of them creaked. It was late, and with each step he expected the landlady’s head to appear around the corner, bristling with curl papers, and unleash a stream of gutter French invective at them, but they ascended the stairwell in peaceful darkness. There’d never been a light in it since he’d moved in, and Otabek was used to finding his way to the top, fingertips brushing a rough-plastered wall and feet feeling for the next tread. Yuri lagged, breath too short after three flights for any more curses.
“Mind the chamber pot,” Otabek said, as they rounded yet another corner.
He heard Yuri’s forceful exhale in the dark, and felt Yuri slide a step closer.
At the top of the stairs Otabek found the key in his pocket and fitted it in the lock of his door, while Yuri caught his breath. Inside, the darkness was softened, made velvet instead of pitch by the window overlooking the trees and lights of the Luxembourg gardens below. It was the one luxury of his room, and the window stood uncurtained night and day except when he was developing film. It kept him in contact with the city he had come to love, grudgingly but deeply, even if after five years Paris remained largely indifferent to his affections.
Otabek crossed the room, as sure-footed in this darkness as he had been below, and found the switch of the lamp. Company merited the expense of electricity, this once.
Yuri had followed him in and now shut the door. He turned in a slow circle, looking around the room. “Wow,” he said. “What a dingy hole.”
It was true, though not often said aloud. Yuri was, in truth, the only company he’d ever had here. Otabek didn’t bother reacting, just reached for the half-empty bottle of gin on the bureau. It wasn’t much better than the Lamberts’ gin and he didn’t have any tonic, warm or otherwise, but it was his own.
“I thought you were a photographer,” Yuri said. “Why don’t you have any pictures up?”
Otabek poured out into his one glass. “Frames cost money.”
“How do you sell anything?”
“What I sell, I frame.” Otabek handed out the glass. “To your health.”
Yuri took it. “To yours,” he said, tilting the glass, and threw it back. He made a face. “I suppose good gin costs money, too.”
He handed the glass over. Otabek filled it again. “Dancing pays well?”
“When they have the money.”
“A music hall?”
Yuri stared at him. “The Ballet Russes.”
Otabek stared back. Fifteen years earlier, Sergei Diaghilev’s company had set the city aflame with the premiere of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Stravinsky’s great works, Firebird and Petrushka. Even now, after the war, the Ballet commanded respect in the artistic circles of Paris. “You’re a principal dancer there?”
Smiling tightly, Yuri took the glass of gin again, though Otabek had intended to drink it himself. “A soloist. For now.”
This time when Yuri swallowed, Otabek watched the line of his throat, the slender strength. He imagined Yuri dancing before the metallic gleam of the footlights, form and movement becoming one, creating music with his body. His body, clad in the fantastical, bright-colored costumes the Ballet was famous for, Slavic dreams from the brushes of Matisse and Picasso. Immersed in the true art of Paris, in the way Otabek yearned to be.
Yuri was staring at him again. He was too young to have learned compassion, and his cool green eyes saw only plain flat truth.
Otabek took the glass back. “How long have you danced with the company?” He filled the glass and then capped the bottle, turning around to put it back on the bureau. With one hand he drank the gin, and with the other he began to turn the crank of the gramophone.
“I apprenticed at sixteen,” Yuri said, behind him “Four years ago.”
“You're twenty?”
“You're good at arithmetic.”
The gramophone crackled as the record began to rotate on the plate. Bessie Smith’s powerful, plaintive wail burst from the speaker, over the mournful twinkle of a blues piano and a muffled horn, the notes sharp and resonant in the small room. Otabek looked at the yellowed, peeling wallpaper over the bureau, then put the glass down and turned around.
“Records cost money too,” Yuri said.
The records, and the gramophone, had been gifts with strings, once upon a time. Otabek didn’t want to talk about Albert tonight. “I save a lot on frames.”
They stared at each other for a long moment. Upright, not slouched on a balcony, Yuri was of a height to look down at Otabek. His eyes, slanted, were a darker green. Otabek tilted his chin up.
When Yuri smiled, it was the slow surprise of sunrise, breaking over a line of smooth snowy hills. Otabek hadn’t expected him to retreat, and he didn’t.
“Are you going to show me your photographs or not?”
Otabek blinked. It felt like giving in, a little, to go to the desk under the window, forcing up the reluctant wooden rolltop. His work lay beneath — what was left of it after the unfortunate event of the unattended valise at the Gare de Lyon station — and he picked up the topmost envelope, weighing it in his hand for a moment before turning around.
Behind him, Yuri had already crossed the small room. The bed springs of Otabek’s single cot, protesting age and ill-usage, gave their familiar screech as Yuri sat down, leaning back on his hands, looking up. The bed sheets were white and it came to Otabek in a singular, fixed instant that Yuri would make a perfect Grecian type, pale sheets against paler skin, the furious, vulnerable jade eyes below the long and tangled golden hair.
Otabek held out the folio. Yuri sat up, reaching forward, and took it.
He untied the waxed string, opening the envelope to spill black and white photographs across his lap. Otabek had been to the track on a rainy spring day, the clouds of dust stirred by horse hooves turned to sticky clods of mud by afternoon. He’d photographed the tiny jockeys, skittish as their mounts, and the hard-eyed men who handled the betting, as well as the harder-eyed men who managed the horse doping. There were the holiday-makers, there to enjoy themselves and lose a few francs, and the pitiless men who made their living on those same francs, on long shots and dogged, grim attention to the politics of the stables.
A friend of a friend had put Otabek onto it, as a way to supplement his scanty income, but it had only taken a morning for Otabek to see that he had no head for the sordid business of managed odds and manipulated favorites. He had only his photographer’s eye, but the rolls of film he brought home from the racing track were worth more to him than any winning ticket.
He hadn’t shown the prints to anyone yet, and he found he was holding his breath, like something precious and painful, as Yuri turned over the pictures. A family from the banlieues, broad hats and neckerchiefs, a picnic lunch in a hamper. A small, wiry man, rotted teeth showing as he leaned in close to speak to the betting clerk, finger pointing to his ticket and the motley queue stretching out behind. The track, dim with a sheet of drizzle between the camera and the patchy grass. Faces, shades of grey. A horse, arching its neck in the stalls, eyes dull with artificial sleep.
Yuri looked up. Otabek braced himself, tongue between his teeth, waiting for the barb.
“These are extraordinary.”
Breath escaped him, shoulders dropping. The corners of his mouth felt plucked up, the motion unaccustomed, and then Otabek smiled. A fluttering, tremulous thing as his heart began to beat, it seemed, for the very first time.
“They aren’t what I wish they could be.”
“What art is?” Yuri was looking down again, shuffling through the photographs. “I don’t know a thing about photography, but this — ” He touched one, a trainer staring at a foaming, exhausted bay horse as the owner bawled him out, cigar in hand. “I feel like I’m there. It makes me feel things. Isn’t that what art’s supposed to do?”
“By some definitions,” Otabek said. He had a better hold on himself now, and though he was still smiling, irony had crept into it. “I had good subjects that day. People and horses don’t usually stay still, the way subjects do in a studio.”
Yuri looked up. “You were a studio photographer before?”
“Once, among other things.” Otabek shifted on his feet, a light and reckless pleasure going through him. Perhaps the gin. “Excuse me a moment. I need to make use of, ah, the facilities.”
Yuri pressed his lips together. “The chamber pot on the stairs?”
“There’s a water closet down the hall,” Otabek said, but he didn’t intend to go that far, late as it was. “I’ll be back.”
Out in the dark corridor, with the door shut behind him, the pleasure bubbling through him grew sharp, rising like an electric current. He wrapped both arms around himself, clenching his jaw against the strange and sudden chill that shook his body, a rippling tide of emotions.
Extraordinary.
From time to time, his pictures had been on exhibit. Hole in the wall galleries, an unfashionable cafe. People walked by with hardly a glance, and the glancers rarely lingered. Once in a while he sold a photograph, for enough francs to pay room and board and buy film, perhaps a bottle of cheap gin. He’d heard kind words, encouraging words, but he wasn’t one of the daring expressionists, like that striking American turning Paris photography on its ear, creating startling images with exposure and collage. Otabek photographed what he saw, as plain and true as he could make it.
No one had ever called his photographs extraordinary.
After a long while, he drew breath again, and descended the stairs in the familiar dark. On the landing he unbuttoned his flies and did his business, one hand on the wall, hips held away. The chamber pot was shallow and treacherous to one’s trouser cuffs. Thus relieved, he buttoned up and climbed the stairs again, moving toward the line of light beneath his door.
Inside, Yuri had changed the music. Instead of the rhythmic churn of the blues, the room was filled with soft, tender piano, light and sweet. Otabek owned just two records, and this one felt incongruous to hear late at night, head fuzzed with cheap gin and that strange, electric potential in the air.
“Debussy is for the morning,” he said, turning, and then he saw Yuri on the bed.
A Grecian type, he’d thought, and Yuri must have heard that sort of thing before. Perhaps at the Ballet Russes he’d been dressed in loose linen trousers and nothing else, slung low across his slim hips. Perhaps that’s how he knew to drape the white sheet so, as he stretched out on the cot, head cocked against the wall and one arm resting above, hand curled around the iron bar of the bed frame. Otabek’s gaze traveled down Yuri’s bare chest, over the sheet and down his strong calves to the arched feet, sensitive and calloused, toes knobbed and slim.
“I thought I’d pose for you,” Yuri said, an edge of bravado in his voice. “Unlike a horse, I can stay still as long as you like.”
Twenty, Otabek thought, remembering himself at the age. A year out of the war, a year into his love affair with this city, art still a dream on the horizon. Alone, without knowing enough to be lonely yet.
He looked up, meeting Yuri’s eyes. Narrow, green, fierce. Yuri knew enough to know what he wanted, Otabek thought. “Let me get my camera.”
His Voigtlander Avus was beneath the desk, nestled and snapped into its brown leather case. It was worth more than any possession he’d ever owned, beyond the borrowed francs with which it had been purchased. It had a life of its own, and when Otabek held it, he became more than he was. A double life, the camera his extended eye, his steady porthole on the world. His pen, his sword, his instrument. His voice and his shield.
Yuri didn’t move as Otabek set up the tripod. The Avus took more effort and care than the cheap Kodak Vest Pocket special he’d used in the war; he set the stops first, then hunched over to focus on the ground glass, moving the lenses as Yuri’s image went wide and blurry and then came clear. He slipped in the film holder, easing along its metal grooves, then pulled out the darkslide, keeping his eye to the viewfinder.
Like this, the world was his. Yuri on the bed, fingers tight on the frame, muscled legs sprawling beneath the rucked-up sheet. The sheet itself fell in painted folds, shadow and light, rising and falling with Yuri’s breath. Green eyes wider now, anticipating, waiting.
The expressionists would make him into something he wasn’t, and that would be art. Daubs of paint on the print, or scratches and silver nitrate during the development, changing truth to fantasy and somehow drawing out truth again, forked and strange. A complex language of form and artistic ideas that Otabek was shut out from as surely as he was shut out of this city, where he’d spent five years as a lovelorn and familiar stranger.
Otabek photographed what he saw. Nothing more than that, but nothing less. He squeezed the bulb and set off the shutter with its blinking stutter-snap, irrevocable, preserving the present, this moment. Yuri Ivanovich Plisetsky, watching him from his bed, beautiful and strong and young.
“That’s good,” Otabek said, as he had in his studio photography days, a thousand miles and more than a lifetime ago. “Lift your chin.”
It was late when the record began to play La fille aux cheveux de lin. Otabek smiled as he straightened up, reaching for another film from his desk drawer. Yuri, lying on his belly with his chin propped on his hands, frowned at him.
“What’s funny?”
Otabek kept smiling to himself, private and amused, and examined the film in his hands. It was old, from the bottom of the drawer. “This song. The girl with the flaxen hair.”
Yuri’s frown deepened, a pouting scowl. “So?”
The film was old, but it was his last one, and in serviceable shape. Otabek peered through the ground glass again, bringing careful focus to Yuri’s face, the world a white blur around him, and then switched for the film holder. “Pull your hair over your shoulders. Let it fall across your face.”
“It’s not flaxen,” Yuri said, but he did as he was asked, shrugging forward the tangled golden waves. “And I’m not a girl.”
He muttered the last words sub voce, as if perhaps he didn’t intend to be heard. Otabek smiled again. “I know.”
The bulb deflated in his grip, setting off the shutter, a syncopated ticking like the fall of a house of cards. The tiny machineries of memory, catching this night like so many silver fish in a net. It was too much to be captured all of a piece, but Otabek could keep parts of the whole, the images as he saw them. The Yuri that he knew, tonight.
The song finished and the record wound down, giving out soft crackles as it spun. Otabek went to turn it over, and glanced in the open drawer as he returned. There was one more film, pressed in the back between two old plates, even older than the last. He plucked it out, then lifted his head.
Yuri had changed his pose. He’d been a subject, the last quarter of an hour, a figure composed of planes and shadows, but Otabek wasn’t looking at him through a camera lens now. The world was in color, and as fluid harp notes filled the air his gaze swept Yuri’s body, the pale languid strength of him, lying uncovered now on the bed.
Not languid, Otabek thought. Tensed, waiting. “I found another film.”
“Come here.”
Otabek set the film on the desk, carefully, and went.
He sat on the edge of the bed. Yuri took Otabek’s hand and laid it flat in the center of his chest, his own hands clasped over it. “I’m tired of posing.”
Otabek looked over his shoulder, turning his body. His hand lay against Yuri’s cool skin, with the hard muscle and bone beneath. Yuri’s hands were warm on his. “One more? It’s the last film.”
Yuri’s fingers circled his wrist, creeping beneath his loose sleeve, fingertips sending soft thrills of pleasure as they moved up his arm. No one had touched Otabek in a long while. “Tomorrow.”
Now Otabek brought up his other hand, closing over Yuri’s through the cloth of his sleeve. Tomorrow. He thought of waking together to church bells and street clamor, hot yellow summer sun. Bread and raspberries and coffee and cream from the cafe below, and a walk along the river to watch the fishing. Lunching on sardines and good cheap white wine at a tavern he knew there. He smiled to himself, recalling the name and the filthy, unintended pun it always brought to mind, with the double meaning of the words. La Pêche Miraculeuse.
He leaned down, as Yuri pushed himself up on one elbow to meet him. Golden hair falling, flaxen hair, green young eyes that had seen the world but not been changed by it yet. Dancer’s shoulders and a rough, sweet mouth, breath coming fast and closer.
“Tomorrow,” Otabek said.